The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will share taxpayer information about undocumented immigrants with homeland security officials, a move that will give unprecedented access to immigration enforcers to aid in deportations.
A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.
The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.
“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”
Homeland security officials haven’t yet requested any tax return information as of 7 April, the filing said, though the memo lays out the process for what can be requested and each agency’s role in requesting or accessing information.
“The Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement have entered into a memorandum of understanding to establish a clear and secure process to support law enforcement’s efforts to combat illegal immigration,” a treasury department spokesperson told Fox News, which reported on the memo early on Tuesday.
In its requests to the IRS, Ice will need to submit the name and address of the taxpayer, which federal criminal statute the person is being investigated for, and why disclosing the tax information would be relevant to the criminal proceeding. Fox reported that the agreement will essentially let Ice cross-check names and addresses of undocumented immigrants with IRS tax records to get current address information from the tax agency.
The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.
“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post.
Tax information is normally strictly shielded by the agency. William Paul, previously the acting chief counsel at the IRS and a civil servant, was replaced as the agency’s top lawyer in March amid concerns among IRS staff over the information sharing.
While undocumented immigrants don’t have social security numbers, they file taxes under an individual taxpayer identification number, or ITIN. The American Immigration Council estimates that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $90bn in taxes in 2023, about $56bn of which was in federal taxes. The group says nearly 5% of the US workforce was undocumented that year.
